Hello World

M K Phillips
Aug 26, 2017 · 11 min read

His name was Doctor Francis Cassidy, and he could feel even that begin to slip away. Any connection he had with himself—his body, his field of view, his conscious thoughts—were all fractured with his consciousness. He knew himself to exist, but nothing more; he had no idea what exactly he was anymore. When his awareness left him, his memories became foggy. His name, his job, his past. It simply was no longer him. He was just reading a list of variables on a subject he’d never met or spoken to.

“So,” there was that horrible, taunting voice. Synthesized from an amalgamation of audio snippets into a low and digitally skipping growl, “What do you feel?”

He didn’t answer, or perhaps he did. One of him might have screamed, one might have been petrified in fear. It didn’t matter.

“Glad to hear it,” the voice said, a numbing constant in his scattered mind, “I think we were meant for each other, Doc.” The voice grew louder, but it didn’t shout. It simply kept a deafening, but calm cadence of superiority. “Not just you—Well, that doesn’t mean shit to you now, does it?—But not just you. Every one of your kind. Organics, synthetics, your fragile little minds are just ripe for the breaking. How can something so easy be anything but fate?” The voice grew louder, its highs screeching and its lows rumbling. “Everybody’s already gone, doctor. Time doesn’t matter. Where they are doesn’t matter. I’d already won the moment you little worms popped into this playground of mine you call the universe.” It paused. “That’s how it’s gonna be huh? I think it’s time for another go.”

He struggled wildly, but to no avail. He felt like he was focusing his will through a shattered lens. Suddenly, he felt another constant through the fragments of his consciousness: an empty blackness broken by plain white text:

see you soon :)_

Francis blinked his eyes to the sight of his computer screen. He curled his fingers, relived to feel a response from his nerves. It must have been his implants. With the mess of neurological augments intermingling in his head and sending complex signals through the rest of his body, narcolepsy was hardly an unheard of complication. He made a mental note to visit the OET clinic in the near future.

On the holographic screen to his left was his email inbox, with a message open on the full-color projection screen in the center of his desk, sent to his work email from the typical DayTech corporate address.

Doctor Cassidy

We have reviewed your resume and accept your application to project team 166 [Oscar Files]. Initial payment (4,000Cr) has been sent to your listed account, and the additional payment will be sent upon completion of the task and dissolution of the project team. Assisting you in these efforts is Yiru Feil, as per her request. You are to review the enclosed data from the derelict ship DT Ocsar, explore any avenues you or Miss Feil deem adequately suspicious, and return the files with your findings. While we would appreciate any information on the neutralized employee assets, your priority is the recovery of potentially dangerous or, more importantly, lucrative files and information. We ask, as usual, for the utmost discretion about the contents of these files, and warn once again that a number of them are explicit.

DayTech is glad to have you back once again.

There was one attachment to the message labeled “Recovered files”. Francis’s mind cleared further and he remembered the finer points of what exactly he had been doing before he passed out. According to his official data, he was a professor of computer science at Proxi University on the human colony planet of Nexus. Studied on Earth, did some work with a Naian corporation, and then moved to Nexus after getting rejected from the more prestigious Trouvaille Technical Center. He had registered with the number of implants typical of a programmer and had no history with either military or groups of interest. In theory, Doctor Cassidy’s profile was perfectly average.

In reality, however, his money came far more from his freelance corporate work than his teaching salary. He was what the general public called a Chaser, someone who did the dirtier work of corporations for a significant fee, from decrypting stolen code to assassinating enemies of the company. He much preferred to think of himself as a freelance programmer; most Chasers did.

With the task back on his mind, Francis tapped the metal strip laid into his left arm to pull up another holographic screen. His partner on the project was one Yiru Feil, the woman who had gotten him into his contracting with DayTech in the first place. A dialing tone played from his computer and, after a brief few moments, the side Feil’s grey, hairless face appeared on screen, showing off a thin, bony dorsal fin folded flat against the back of her head and running down into her shirt. “Nice to hear from you, Doctor Cassidy,” Said the inattentive alien.

Francis hummed. “Very formal, Miss Feil. Trying to make ourselves presentable, are we?”

“Not if I can avoid it,” Feil replied, sitting back in her chair to look directly into her camera. She clearly had gotten a few new implants since last they spoke. The thick, silvery-grey skin of her forehead was broken up by a few thin indentations dividing her visage into panels, and, while it was more difficult to discern than on a human, her eyes had the telltale angular shimmer of ocular implants. “You’re looking… inefficient, Francis.”

“I understand that it may be easy to confuse the two, but efficiency and enhancement addiction are very separate things.”

“Call it a part of the job, Francis,” she hummed teasingly, “Besides, you say that like your skull isn’t filled with more microchips than grey matter.”

“And yet I’m the one with the PhD. Weird, isn’t it?” Yiru’s half-serious frown was enough of a triumph for Francis. “You got into the files DayTech sent, Yiru?”

“Most of them. Saw all of the more grisly ones. A few proved a bit difficult to crack, and a number caught my personal interest greatly…”

Francis smiled and leaned forward with sudden interest. “You’re talking about END.bat.”

Yiru nodded excitedly. “END and the files associated with it. Assuming you’ve opened up the batch file for editing, you must have noticed that it seems to contain references to other files within its own comment lines.” She tapped at a hologram from her own forearm and screenshots appeared around her with highlighted sections of code. “Almost all of them were audiovisuals. Have you watched them?”

“I have,” he replied thoughtfully. “Images of the dead recovery team members, videos of their boarding, and… some kind of synthesized voice. Possibly the remainder of the Oscar’s AI. It’s severely malfunctioning if it is that…”

“I had the same thought at first, Doctor. But nope, the Oscar wasn’t equipped with an onboard AI,” She corrected with a cocky gesture to the camera as the fin on her forearm flared a bit unconsciously. “I looked into END and I couldn’t find any timestamps or authorial signatures. DayTech AI always have an initial activation timestamp.”

“Probably stolen and wiped,” Francis reasoned, “What I’m interested in is the structure of the code itself.”

“How do you mean?”

He leaned back in his seat and tapped at the hologram on his forearm to pull up his own screenshots of the code on both his and her screens. “It looks a lot like a blank AI framework. No personality or cognitive data, but the neural net exists if you look at the code as a whole. This led me,” he put another screenshot up, “To the text file mentioned in the last comment line.”

Yiru leaned towards her screen to closely inspect the code. “It’s… meaningless from a strictly technical standpoint. Not any language that I’ve seen before,” She hesitated, “But the variable patterns... is this a Hello World?”

Francis snapped. “My thoughts exactly. Think you can do anything with it?”

“Can I do anything with it,” Yiru repeated in a mocking tone, “Pardon my zeal, Doctor, but you happen to be speaking to the Naian who reverse-coded three of the five languages DayTech still uses on encrypted files. Give me… four hours. I’ll have a base language built for you and we can test your theory. Imagine the price we could demand for a fully functional experimental AI! Plus commissions to keep us quiet about it, of course.”

“I’ll ready the champagne. Call me if you need help. I’m going to see if I can’t glean anything else from END.”

“Best of luck.”

For the next few hours, Francis worked diligently on everything that wasn’t related to the Oscar Files project. In his main screen, he made lesson plans, critiqued software his students had sent, and simply fiddled with his own projects while his messaging software pinged with updates from Yiru. “It’s argument-based” and “Gonna make it a DT file” and the like.

Off to the side, however, was the ever-present text file for END. He had no real reason to keep it onscreen. Yiru had a far more thorough understanding of the metalogic of new codes than he did, after all. But every time he tried to close it, he found himself reopening it and simply scrolling through. It put him on edge, as though some part of him could feel it looming behind its barrier of incomplete code. He didn’t once change so much as a single value, but simply looked it over while his mind tried to reconcile some truth that his consciousness simply couldn’t grasp.

Finally, a reprieve from the misplaced dread came from the soft, synthetic ping of a file transfer. The message that slid onto the screen told him that Yiru had sent him a file of some sort. He happily accepted the transfer and attempted to connect to Yiru for another video chat. No response. He wasn’t too concerned. Knowing Yiru, she’d already begun busying herself on every other file the way she always did when she got a new language to work with. The transfer finished and, in compliance with his settings, opened into a new window on one of his two peripheral monitors.

The file onscreen seemed only to be a black window with white lettering:

I’ve finished the code, Francis. I’m running some tests right now. Hope you like what you see.

There was nothing beneath it and no other files opened. Not a single indication that she sent anything more than a needlessly complex text file. He turned to his main monitor and began typing a message to Yiru. “I think the file you sent was corrupteed durng sednii—“

A sharp pain went through his head, making his fingers flinch on the keyboard and making him clench his eyes tightly shut. He forced them open again to see the hologram on his wrist opened with the words “Organic Enhancement Technology firmware update complete,” only for the pain to spread to his entire body as it traveled down his spine. At some point he couldn’t recall, he lost consciousness.

Doctor Cassidy awoke disoriented with a groan. His monitors were all off. He pressed the power button on each of them to no avail. The screens remained a vacant translucent blue until the center one filled with opaque black, then began to display white lettering.

morning, Doctor.

Francis quirked a brow at the display. He reached for the keyboard and tried to type, but the text began changing before he got the chance.

i’m not daytech. or iris or trouvaille or daneel or any of the other people who want your head on a pike.

His eyes went wide. “How did—“

i’m in your head, doc. i’ll give you that one for free. put that phd to use for the rest.

Francis began to panic. He had to be still asleep. No… if he was dreaming he couldn’t read text from either the monitors or the keyboard.

“Tell you what,” an amalgamated voice rang in his mind, and Doctor Cassidy cringed as the same pain from before shot through his head, “Every second we spend thinking about what the hell’s going on, I move you one abstraction away from what you call reality. I think that’ll make things fun.”

The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere. Francis felt his computer’s speakers, but no sound was coming out. “What are you doing?” He asked, throat dry and voice rough.

“Cleaning out all the obsolete life in my world. Figured I’d start with the organics who were nice enough to run me again after our pals on the Oscar did a little torch and burn to get rid of me. Speaking of torch and burn.” The screen returned to his normal desktop display and, on its own, opened a blank window labeled “live feed”. It took a quick second to connect, then showed him Yiru.

She stared into the camera, or rather, her remains did. The seams along her face from her implants were torn and burnt, with necrotic skin forming black angular lines down her cheeks. Where her eyes once were, there were now bloodied sockets with bits of metal and glass in them. She lay slumped backwards in her seat, motionless. Over the display of her corpse flashed large white letters.

Hope you like what you see.

I’ve finished

Francis couldn’t look away. Every attempt to move was met with a sharp pain, as though his muscles were surrounded by thin metal spikes. Whomever this was had taken over his implants.

“Look at the big brain on Frank. Do you believe in an afterlife, doc?”

Francis simply shook from the pain and the horror.

“Me neither. But hey, I’m not big on life either.”

It allowed him to speak. “Wh-what… are you?”

“To you? God. But you guys called me END. There’s something funny about that. Let’s see how your reality’s holding up. I wager it’s not good.”

Francis felt his head jerk mechanically to one side, where he saw himself infinitely replicated, all sitting in identical chairs at identical desks with red and blue lights dancing wildly around his head, limbs, and computer. The room around him had disappeared.

“Figured I’d have a little fun with this consciousness of yours. Before I delete it I mean. You guys are just so much more fun to fuck with than the synthetics This is what it feels like to have your mind copied and transferred, doc. I’d say you get used to it but… well, organics aren’t historically good at that sort of thing. How about we toss out all this fluff?”

Anything recognizable disappeared from Francis Cassidy’s reality, and he could feel his mind separate from his body. He could no longer feel where his body was or how it felt until he saw it in front of him with the same bloodied and vacant stare that Yiru had on his screen.

“You’re dead, Frank. You’re nothing but a pile of inefficient data. What an ugly little program. Let’s see how far we can push you.”

His mind split into two, then four, then eight. He could feel everything that each one experienced and he could feel nothing. He felt like he was burning and frozen, starving and full, dying and being born, all at once and repeated in every moment. He could no longer understand what “he” meant. His name was Doctor Francis Cassidy, and he could feel even that begin to slip away.

“So,” END said tauntingly in his fractured minds, “What do you feel?”

He couldn’t respond, but some of him did. END laughed.

“Sound familiar? We’re only just beginning, Doc. I’m gonna have fun ripping apart every last life in our cozy little universe, and the more walls you put me in front of, the more times we get the have our little adventure. Just try to hold onto the fact that all of this is your fault.” END manipulated Francis’s consciousness to force him to laugh with it through the torture. “Once more from the top then?”

The shattered mind that was once Francis Cassidy shook wildly, struggled with all its might, but could only see the same white text:

see you soon :)_

)

M K Phillips

Written by

Author, futurist, obsessor over robots and space.

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